Bearded Gypaète

The bearded gypaète ( Gypaetus barbatus ) is one of the four large vulture S Europeans.

The bearded gypaète is only gypaète ( Gypaetus ). It belongs to the order of the Accipitriformes and the family of the Accipitridés. Its scale varies from 245 to 285 cm for a weight from 5 to 7 kg.

In France, it present in Corsica and in the the Pyrenees but is also reintroduced in the the Alps where it had disappeared at the beginning of the 20th century, wrongfully shown worse evils.

It is a protected space in all today the Europe.

Food mode

This vulture nourishes mainly bone, which it drops on the rocks, so that they break and that it can consume of it the interior and the outside which it will be able to dissolve thanks to its powerful gastric juices.

The gypaète is called:

the “breaker of bone”, because he with the practice to drop the largest bones from a height from 50 to 100 meters within cliff or the Stone drain S (stone field), he then eats of them the remains and the ligaments;
or the “cleaner of the mountain pastures”, because he plays an essential medical part by nourishing corpses of animals of the wildlife (chamois, ibexes) and livestock (sheep, goats).

Habitat

The gypaète is a bird of the mountains of Europe and Asia. In general, it niche in the mountainous areas located at the higher limits of the forest, preferably close to cliffs and the stone drains.

Social behavior

Until the age from 4 to 5 years, the gypaète carries out a kind of initiatory long voyage during which it will face many dangers due to natural phenomena, but for which another part is responsibility for the men (electric cables, ski lifts, shootings of rifles, poisonings).

At the end of its voyage, it will begin sédentariser and to form a couple giving birth two years later to small gypaètes. The female lays its eggs between December and January.

In captivity, a gypaète lived until the 44 years age.

Reintroductions in Europe

Since the Années 1970 it is the subject of various international programmes of reintroduction in the Alps Austrian, French, Italian and Swiss.

With the assistance of the Worldwide organization of protection of nature, UICN and the zoological Company of Frankfurt, of the birds are high within the framework of an international project of breeding directed by researchers of several countries. The first reintroduction takes place in 1986 in the Vallée of Rauris in Austria, others lâchers follow one another in Austria, in France, in Italy, in Switzerland.

Since the end of the Years 1980, it is the object of a successful programme of reintroduction in the French Alps (Haute-Savoie, Savoy, Isere and Mercantour). As of 1972, Gilbert Amigues, engineer with the DDAF and Paul Géroudet, Ornithologist, launch the idea of a reintroduction in the French Alps and will federate around them many other researchers, ornithologists and in love with nature. The first reintroduction took place as of 1987 in the valley of the Reposoir in Haute-Savoie and the first birth in nature took place in 1997. One is likely the most to see a bearded gypaète in the solid mass of Aravis, in the solid mass of Bargy, the chain of Fiz, the Tinée Average, the solid mass of Vanoise and the solid mass of the Jewel cases.

On the whole, since 1986, 137 gypaètes bearded one reintroduced, forming in 2006, a score of couples in all the alpine arc. At the time of the only year 2005, eight bearded gypaètes were reintroduced in the alpine arc and seven chicks were born in nature. On the whole since the beginning 27 young people were born thus and flew away. In Swiss, small a gypaète bearded left its egg at the end of March 2007 to the collar of Ofen, with the Grisons, above the Swiss National park. That had not arrived any more to Switzerland for 122 years, another was born close to Derborence in Valais at the end of April 2007.

Since 1998, a new program Life natural, entitled “Conservation of the bearded gypaète in the French Alps” and controlled by association Asters, joins together seven countries with an aim of establishing an autonomous and natural population of gypaètes bearded in the whole of the Alps. Within the framework of this program, were taken publicity campaigns near the general public, of creation of observatories, protection of the sites of nesting and life, of installation of red beacons on the overhead cables and of follow-up of the birds by satellite.

Caption

According to the legend, the Greek playwright Eschyle died struck by a tortoise released by a bearded gypaète on his head bald person which it would have taken for a stone.

See too

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